While services deliver dynamic, personalized, and relevant applications though discovery, invocation and composition, a key remaining challenge is to support automated interoperability without necessitating human intervention. The inclusion and use of semantic web annotations promise to make Web-based information and services both accessible and understandable to agents and other applications. Emerging ontologies (e.g. DAML-S) are being used to construct semantically rich service descriptions. Techniques for planning, composing, editing, reasoning and analyzing about these descriptions are being investigated, and deployed to resolve semantic interoperability between services within scalable, open environments.

Key research challenges in the area of web services, grid services and multiagent computing include the construction of ontologies for service description, ontologies of service types (i.e. describing classes of services), etc, as well as techniques that support the manipulation of service descriptions to automate service discovery, translation, composition, etc.